![Bri'ish Food!!! [CW: Meat]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/3265cfdd-d22d-49ec-ba53-77bcad902135.jpeg){kind=link}
EDIT: Okay, it was a bit silly of me to drag my heels in, I don’t strictly hate it and there are good things about British cooking (mostly veggies), but I find the meme’s meat obsession super silly. I am having stomach pains and cramped arteries just looking at this stuff.
Highly underrated
I love how it’s superimposed on the diapers lmao, I hope the meme was ironic
All of those cuisine are food from the diaspora with actual existing cuisine:
Tex-mex (Mexican)
Creole/Cajun (French/West African)
New Yorkican (Puerto Rican?)
Italian-american (Italian)
Chinese-american (Chinese)
As far as food is concerned, the only food that counts is the food of the original settlers as well as the earliest Europeans who were incorporated into whiteness. So basically, Anglo Americans, Scot Americans, Dutch Americans, German Americans, and Scandinavian Americans. In other words, WASPs.
At a basic level, you don’t get to enslave Black people for centuries only to count soul food or Black-influenced food as “American” food. You don’t get to pass a law blocking Chinese immigration for a century only to pretend the bastardization of Cantonese food called Chinese American food counts as American food. This has the same exact energy as Brits trying to claim curry as British cuisine after starving millions of Indians to death or Zionists trying to pretend the food Palestinians have been eating for centuries is “Israeli.”
All of these are fusion cuisines. A Tex-Mex taco is essentially a completely different thing than a Norteno Mexican taco. Chinese American food has only the most the most distant relationship to Cantonese food. This food exists and, guess what, is often enjoyed by white people as well as people in the diaspora as well as everyone else. This food objectively exists and is what people actually eat. Whether it’s good that it exists and how we should put it in it’s historical context in the legacy of racism, colonialism, etc. is important but it’s fucked up to say that this stuff essentially doesn’t exist
This has the same basic prejudices as saying a creole language is just a bastardized version of a European one
The food 100% exist, but they are food of their respective diaspora, not their host countries. To use the Chinese diaspora as an example, Chinese American food is lumped in with Chinese Korean food, Chinese Peruvian food, Chinese Japanese food, and so. They are unified by the fact that the origin cuisine is ultimately Chinese even if they’ll obviously be differences from each other and from their origin cuisine.
Now, the reasonable question is whether Chinese American food is Chinese food with American characteristics or American food with Chinese characteristics, so this is where my comment on the Chinese Exclusion Act comes in. Given that there’s the legacy of racism, colonialism, etc as you said, then Chinese American food ought to be considered Chinese food (or Chinese diasporic food if you think they diverge too much from “pure” Chinese food) to reflect on the Chinese diaspora’s continued estrangement from being considered “true” Americans due to Sinophobia and general white supremacy. It goes back to my earlier comment. By what grounds can white Americans spit on the collective faces of Chinese Americans while claiming Chinese American food as their own?
It was a a cuisine developed in America that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It was developed by Americans (Chinese immigrants and their descendents) and eaten by Americans, and not only white people lol. There is a Chinese takeout place in virtually every poor urban neighborhood in the country. What should we call it, if not American? Do you not count as American if you’re of Chinese origin? If you want to insist on it being specifically Chinese American, I agree! Chinese-American is a subset of Americans
Of all the things to go off on, it’s bizarre to choose a cheap, tasty cuisine primarily beloved by the proletariat.
This is the fundamental disagreement we have. Chinese Americans are a subset of the Chinese diaspora. They really aren’t Americans outside of legal status and citizenry. They certainly aren’t treated like Americans, especially right now with the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and various Chinese American scientists being investigated by the FBI for perceived “CCP” and “ethnic” loyalty. Really, most diasporic Americans (or at least most nonwhite diasporic Americans) aren’t actually Americans if we understand Americans to be the inheritors and heirs of the settler colonial project known as the United States of America. This is true even for Black people whose ancestors have existed in this country for centuries. A Chinese American has far more in common with a Chinese Canadian than a white American, so it makes more sense to lump your average Chinese American together with your average Chinese Canadian. The things that unifies them both is that both are members of the Chinese diaspora, in particular the English-speaking members of the Chinese diaspora.
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Why would we define Americans in that very specific and idiosyncratic way?
Please go around talking to people of color in the United States and explain this to them and see what they think I guess.
It just seems like you’re accepting all of the premises about the intrinsic alieness and foreignness of people of color in the US that your standard white nationalist would have but woke
Becoming a eugenicist to avoid the idea that Americans have good food
No, they aren’t American because they haven’t completely assimilated into whiteness. This is arguably a good thing because American is a fake settler-colonial identity anyways.
Kinda bizarre how people here are having these patsoc-adjacent takes.
I mean, you shouldn’t want to be American in the same way you shouldn’t want to be Israeli. Pretty much every single Black radical like Malcolm X reject being American, so I’m not saying anything particularly new. There’s that famous speech by a Hawaiian activist titled “We are not Americans.” Modern Pan-African orgs and Indigenous communities also reject the label American as well as the settler-colonial borders of the US and Canada. There’s plenty of Indigenous tribal nations and communities that have their ancestral lands separated into a US Native American half and a Canadian First Nations half, but they still understand themselves as one people because unlike the two illegitimate settler-colonies, they constitute a real nation.
The only real reason why you don’t hear this rhetoric among the various diasporas is because most diaspora communities function as a buffer zone between white settlers at the top and the Black and Indigenous at the bottom. There’s a degree of assimilation/gusanofication among the diasporas too, but for the nonwhite diasporas at least, white settlers are too pathologically racist for them to be fully integrated into whiteness and the settler-colonial order. Just like how the US-Canadian border is largely a legal matter among Indigenous nations, whether your nationality is American or Canadian is largely a legal matter among the diasporas.
Perfectly fine by me if anyone doesn’t want to identify as American. But plenty of people do, and who are you to tell them they aren’t?
How do you square this with the fact that the US is a settler-colony that must be dismantled? With the dismantlement of the US, they wouldn’t be Americans because there wouldn’t be an America to identify as.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
That’s not how foodways work.
This is an extremely weird thing to say. Italian-American, and Chinese-American foods are distinct from their origins, enough that they are recognized as unique. You can acknowledge the material conditions leading to a diaspora and ethnically segregated communities in the first place as well as the nature of foodways and still understand that slavery, racism, and oppression is bad. Black Americans are still Americans and “soul food” is a uniquely American foodway.
There are still large portions of the population who can’t hold chopsticks. You can’t claim cuisine belongs to a country if like half the population can’t even eat it properly, let alone cook it. Compare that to Italian food. Everyone knows how to make pasta, everyone knows how to eat pasta.
Are you claiming that Chinese Americans aren’t American because Americans use forks to eat noodles unlike Italian food which is American because Americans eat those noodles with a fork? I hope this is a bit about how pasta was invented in China first and I’m just too tired to understand it
I’m saying in order for it qualify as “American Food” and not just “Chinese American Food” non-Chinese Americans would need to know how to make it like they know how to make Italian food. At the minimum Non-Chinese Americans don’t get to simultaneously shit on Chinese food and claim it for their own. KFC in China is also distinct from American Cuisine but nobody in China is claiming it’s “American Chinese” or whatever.
dawg I know you mean well here, but you are doing race essentialism based on food utensils. Chinese Americans have existed in America for nearly 200 years and have distinct foodways based entirely on the history of regional cuisines, available ingredients, and the interaction between those two things and other cultures in a new space. It is called Chinese American because it is distinct from the remembered cuisine and unique to the space where it was created. This is what happens to any and every culture when they are displaced, forcibly or voluntarily. Chinese-Argentinian food will be related to Chinese-American food but will be unique to that culture and local ingredients.
If they were truly unique, then you wouldn’t consider them American food either. They would just be their own set of dishes that is neither Chinese nor American but its own thing. I could respect that and even make an argument earlier that Chinese American, Chinese Peruvian, Chinese Korean, and so on could be lumped together as Chinese diasporic food that is neither “pure” Chinese nor food of their host countries. But you are not doing that. In comparison to Chinese food, it’s “these dishes are heavily divergent from Chinese food,” but in comparison to American food, it’s suddenly “uh aktually, these are American dishes despite having little in common with other American dishes.” Chinese American food might be different than “pure” Chinese food, but it’s still a helluva lot similar to that than “pure” American food. Why the double standard?